i've recently gotten hold of a macbook and i gotta say that i'm totally lovin it. Now I have it running pretty well with kismet (yes that's kismet), nmap, metasploiot, ettercap etc... and all seems to be working well.

My question is, do any of you pentesters out there use a mac as your main pentest platform? or through experience have you found it to not be as flexible as Linux?

i've done a little testing in the week that i've had it and it seems to be working well but I just wondered if theres a "gotcha" just waiting to happen.

Any thoughts on this would be great.

Cheers

Syn

p.s Has anyone read Johnny Long's book on OS X Hacking and if so was it any good?

I'm currently rocking a MBP. Mac Ports have most things, and I fall back to a Samurai/BT3 installation on VM Fusion if needed.

There's quite a Fusion Vs Parrallels argument on various different sites (also if it's a linux guest OS you're looking at, I've heard good things of VirtualBox) and with the current releases they're about neck and neck. I chose Fusion because of my familiarity with VM products. There are some arguments about better video hardware acceleration, but if it that important go bootcamp and install whatever OS you want.

I've also got the OSX for Hackers book, it's good but it's starting to look a bit dated (there's a chapter on setting up kisMAC which is no longer needed as kismet works fine from ports), but if you're totally new to OSX it's worth a quick read.

I'm still with the "whatever you're most comfortable with" camp, I just happen to be comfortable with overpriced eyecandy

I love my Mac absolutely love it. I have a sweet setup, I have Mac Os X Server, Linux Red Hat, and Windows (I know, I know, it's a sin to have windows on my apple, Dont Ye Judge least ye be Judged... or something like that), All natively installed. I use Fusion for quick switching. For my wireless security testing I use AirCrack. I have a virtual machine I use just for that. I also have AirCrack installed on my Mac Via Macports but the linux version can do much more easier.

I have used both Parallels, and Fusion, I prefer Fusion.

I use Kismac NOT Kismet, to gather information about networks and import the findings into AirCrack, and use that to test my Wireless Security.

With a few easy work arounds, in my personal opinion, Macs are the way to go... If you can afford them of course... Im still paying for mine

Currently going for $29, but you can find promos and codes all the time to get them for $5 or sometimes free! And the antenna comes right off to put something a bit bigger on it. Then you take it and put this firmware on it:

And now you have a little guy, that can do all kinds of fun things, running Airserv so that you can actually do the computing on your machine while the packets are grabbed via the Fon. Man it works like a charm, and i even built a batter pack on mine out of 4 AAs so that I don't have to use a power adapter